Chapter 45: Infiltrating the Abandoned Ruins

An hour after leaving Lady Yun’s lounge, Lin Tian reached the drop-point near the arena tunnels.

Her network had delivered exactly as promised — a heavy scroll holding the compound’s structural blueprints and the full patrol schedule of Gu Hai’s elite guards, along with a small sealed vial that smelled faintly of copper. Blood, taken from a kitchen knife Gu Hai had used that morning. Enough to fool a blood-lock, if it came to that.

He moved east through District 59, the blood-red glow of the central market fading behind him, replaced by something darker and heavier.

The Blood-Iron Mercenaries had built their base into the ruins of a collapsed mining colony. Jagged scrap metal and hollowed stalagmites formed the walls. Heavy iron gates barred the main entrance, and the faint hum of Tier-2 defensive arrays crackled in the damp air.

To most cultivators, breaking in here to steal Gu Hai’s Secret Ledger would mean certain death.

To Lin Tian, this fortress was just a heavily encrypted server. The guards were firewalls. Firewalls could be exploited.

He stood motionless in the shadow of a rusted scaffold overhead, cloak absorbing what little light reached this deep into the ruins.

"System." He kept the thought quiet. "Activate [Insight Eye]. Sync with the acquired blueprints. Full diagnostic on perimeter defenses."

The dark sharpened under the overlay. Defensive array lines glowed bright yellow, their rotation patterns and blind spots laid bare in the data. Whoever had drawn up these blueprints for Lady Yun’s network had done thorough work — every visible sentry post matched exactly where the scroll said it would be.

Through the mesh, he tracked the guards patrolling the outer ruins, marking each one before moving on to the next.

Two heavily armored mercenaries held the primary chokepoint into the bunker below. Seasoned killers, both of them, reeking of old blood even from this distance.

Using Qi against them would trigger the array network instantly. This had to be silent. Mechanical.

He locked onto the first guard.

[Target: Elite Mercenary Guard]

[Cultivation: Qi Gathering Level 6]

[Flaw Detected: Severe meridian damage in the right shoulder from an old, poorly healed demon beast bite. The accumulation of toxic Qi has caused chronic muscle stiffness. Reaction time to attacks from his right blindside is reduced by seconds.]

A cold smile crossed his face under the hood. He shifted to the second guard.

[Target: Elite Mercenary Guard]

[Cultivation: Qi Gathering Level 5]

[Flaw Detected: Chronic lung toxicity due to the prolonged consumption of cheap, impure fiery-attribute cultivation pills. The target’s respiratory cycle stutters exactly every eighth breath, causing a microsecond of physiological paralysis to suppress a cough.]

A slow blindside and a respiratory stutter. His mind ran the exploit clean. Two flaws, two openings, both usable in the same window.

He didn’t draw a sword. He didn’t channel a drop of Qi. Just the raw kinetic force of his [Primordial Yang-Tyrant Body] and the mechanical weapons he’d built with his own hands back at the Resource Hall.

He watched the second guard’s chest rise and fall from the rafters, counting silently.

Five. Six. Seven.

On the eighth breath, the man’s chest hitched — a tiny spasm, his body fighting the urge to cough.

Lin Tian dropped.

He landed directly behind the Level 6 guard, exactly on his damaged right side, before the man’s stiff shoulder could register the shift in air pressure.

His left arm snapped forward. The wrist-crossbow triggered with a near-silent thwip.

A toxic bolt buried into the base of the guard’s skull. His eyes rolled back, vocal cords paralyzed instantly, body slumping like a puppet with cut strings.

In the same motion, Lin Tian pivoted off his own falling momentum and closed on the second guard, still frozen mid-cough, mouth open, lungs locked.

His wrist-blade snapped out. One clean strike upward through the soft tissue under the jaw, severing the brain stem before the man’s body even registered what had happened.

He caught the falling weight with his free hand, lowering it to the stone without a sound.

Two lines of corrupted code, deleted. His breathing stayed even through all of it.

He stepped over both bodies and scanned deeper into the ruins, [Insight Eye] already marking the next patrol cluster three guards strong, further down the corridor.

"System. Filter environmental data. Highlight structural weaknesses in the overhead pillars."

He didn’t just need the guards dead. He needed this whole infiltration to look like nothing more than the ruins doing what unstable ruins always eventually did — collapsing on the wrong people at the wrong time. Gu Hai needed to blame bad luck, not an assassin working his way toward the study.

The overlay lit up a rusted iron pipe suspended directly above the next patrol group, its load-bearing joints corroded past any reasonable safety margin. A single well-placed strike would do more damage than a dozen guards could stop.

He loaded another bolt and moved deeper into the dark, patient, methodical, already three steps ahead of guards who had no idea they were being hunted.

The corridor narrowed as he advanced, walls closing in tighter with every step deeper into the mining colony’s original tunnels. Old support beams, some rotted through entirely, groaned faintly overhead whenever a draft passed through.

He crouched at a junction where the corridor split three ways, checking the blueprint against what his eyes actually showed him. The eastern branch led toward the barracks. The western branch, according to Lady Yun’s intelligence, led toward Gu Hai’s private study — and the false wall hiding the ledger behind it.

The middle branch was unmarked on the scroll entirely. A gap in someone’s otherwise thorough intelligence.

Either an oversight, or something they didn’t want documented. He filed the discrepancy away, choosing the western path for now. Curiosity could wait until the ledger was secured — this wasn’t the moment to go exploring blind tunnels for the sake of information nobody had asked him to find.

Three guards patrolled ahead, exactly where the overlay had marked them. He pressed against the tunnel wall, letting the shadows do their work while he studied their formation.

Two walked in step, chatting low about nothing important. The third trailed a few paces back, head on a swivel, clearly the more alert of the group.

[Target: Elite Mercenary Guard]

[Cultivation: Qi Gathering Level 7]

[Flaw Detected: Minor auditory desensitization from years of exposure to explosive talismans during combat operations. High-frequency sounds above a certain threshold go largely unnoticed by the target.]

The alert one had a gap after all — just not the same kind as the first two. Every man down here carried some weakness written into his body by the life he’d chosen. Lin Tian just happened to be the only one in this tunnel who could read it.

He waited for the trio to pass beneath the corroded pipe, timing it against their pace, against the faint groan of settling stone overhead.

A single precise strike to the pipe’s weakest joint would bring down enough debris to bury all three without a drop of blood spilled by his own hand — exactly the kind of accident Gu Hai’s men would write off without asking questions, in a district where cave-ins happened often enough that nobody bothered investigating them anymore.

He raised the crossbow, adjusted his aim toward the corroded joint instead of the guards themselves, and waited for the last footstep to fall into position.

The Vulture had found his opening. Now it was just a matter of pulling the trigger and letting physics finish the job nobody down here would ever think to question.